When Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner discovered that Klout displayed popular moments from Facebook—even if those moments had been shared with “friends” rather than “public”—he posted about it.

Used Klout before? Well you should know that Klout publicly displays your personal profile updates IF you have your…

“Disconnect Klout from your Facebook profile if you don’t want the world to see your non-public updates,” he cautioned.

But here’s the thing. Klout may be the least of your worries: everything is potentially public. People can take a screen capture of your Snapchat, Facebook photo, or text. Just ask Randi Zuckerberg!

With the advent of the social web, you never really had any privacy. What you had was the illusion of privacy, which has gotten harder to maintain as technology makes it easier for people to access information about you.

Your social security number used to be displayed (along with your entire mortgage document) in the public record books at the Registry of Deeds. Your home phone number used to be public information (and still is, unless you pay the phone company to keep it unlisted). Tax records on properties you own are public records.

All of this information was theoretically public decades ago, but without online search capability, people could not easily access it. This barrier maintained the illusion of privacy I mentioned earlier.

The barrier has fallen, and with it the illusion. Think your home address is private (perhaps because you rent instead of own)? Think again. A one-second search on whitepages.com can reveal your home address, phone number, age, relatives and more.

Sites like this aggregate information from all public sources and make it easily searchable. It’s not illegal, because the information is public already, but it is insanely creepy. There’s nothing so jarring as receiving a letter at your home from a stranger who found your name on some tax records and looked up where you live.

But don’t give up! There are some things you can do to maintain the few shreds of privacy you have left.

1. Adjust your settings.

Although far from a guarantee that your private information won’t be displayed publicly, adjusting your settings is one relatively simple thing you can do to protect yourself.

Facebook has created a video tutorial to guide users through their notoriously convoluted privacy settings.

Google also offers sophisticated options for security and privacy, from enabling 2-step verification on your gmail account to setting up “circles” for your contacts.

Twitter and Instagram both give you the option of making your account private, although most people in our space wouldn’t do that.

Live-streaming apps Periscope and Meerkat let you decide whether to share your video stream with specific users or make it available publicly. You can also choose whether to enable comments from anyone, or only from people you follow.

2. Disable location.

Okay, so technically this is a setting you can adjust (see above), but the highly sensitive nature of information like your home address makes it worth calling out separately.

If you want to enable location services on your mobile device so you can see local search results or attach a location to your Instagram photos or tweets when you’re at an event, feel free.

Just remember to disable location for individual apps when you’re back home, or you might discover that a simple map view of your posts reveals the exact location of your home. Creepy much?

3. Pay for an unlisted phone number.

Check with your phone service provider about getting an unlisted number. It’s the best money you’ll ever spend. Or if you want to save money and protect your privacy, consider dropping the landline altogether. 41% of American households don’t even have a landline phone anymore!

While you’re at it, register all your phone numbers (landline and mobile) on the National Do Not Call Registry to reduce the number of telemarketing calls you get: https://www.donotcall.gov/.

4. Use a post office box as your address.

Some companies require a residential address, but if they’ll let you use a P.O. box instead, do it. For companies that insist upon a street address, ask if you can use your P.O. box as the mailing address.

This helps to reduce the chance that your residential address will appear publicly on directory sites like Whitepages, Superpages, AnyWho, etc.

If your information should appear on a site like that, however, request that the listing be taken down. Most sites provide some mechanism for this, although it can be frustratingly difficult to find. Check out the multiple steps required to remove your listing from Whitepages, for instance.

5. Register domains privately.

Everyone has a website these days (and if you don’t, you should). But when you register the domain of your choice, make sure to select private registration rather than public. This prevents people from seeing your address and phone number if you’re registering a personal site.

6. Protect yourself from imposters.

There are creepy people who steal photos of other people’s children from Instagram and repost them as their own.

There are people who steal photos of other people online, repost them, and build an elaborate fantasy life, featuring a fictionalized version of themselves. One such case—The Curious Case of Leah Palmer—involved three years’ worth of stolen photos.

The imposter wove photos lifted from the victim’s accounts into a fictional online persona that interacted with other people across social networks. The fake posts often included details of the victim’s actual location and the actual names of her friends and relatives. These seeds of truth made the fake account seem real, to the point that some men even engaged in an online relationship with the imposter.

I can’t imagine what drives people to do things like this, but it happens and it’s creepy. Unless you stop sharing altogether, you can’t completely insulate yourself from weirdos, but you can report imposter accounts.

Sadly, privacy is little more than a fading illusion, but you can strive to keep some aspects of your personal life from being broadcast online. Checking and rechecking your settings on various networks takes time and effort, but it’s worth it! What tips do you have for privacy protection?

We can all recite the now cliche quote that marketing will change more in the next 5 years than it did in the last 50. We’ve all said at some point that change is the only constant. But do we really love it?

Change can be downright terrifying, yet for many of us it isn’t because we are terrified of something new. No, it is because our lives and our budgets are full, and every change, every new thing, takes something away from what we have today. If we could just keep adding, it would be so much easier.

Overwhelming changes

Our family has been on a change roller coaster the last few months. We’ve designed and built a house. Had a new baby girl. And left behind the urban and suburban life we had become so comfortable with over almost two decades, trading it all in for rural acreage that my colleagues already refer to as “the farm” (yes, that is it in the photo!).

Acreage has been a dream of ours for more than a decade, we finally moved a month ago. There were always reasons “now” wasn’t the right time, but had I known earlier what I know now about living purposefully, it would have happened so much sooner.

Have a vision. We had a dream, we even talked about plans, but that wasn’t enough. We didn’t change until we wrote down what this dream would provide for our children that we simply couldn’t get from the suburbs. We wrote it on a poster-size piece of paper and put it on the wall where it stared down at us at every meal.

Break your inertia. Few things have come to bother me more than what I call a default decision, or treating today the same way you did yesterday simply because you didn’t take the time to consider doing anything different. Every day we get is precious, what are you going to do today?

Get comfortable with discomfort. The future isn’t predictable. Our new home wasn’t complete by most standards, but the place we were renting ended up in foreclosure and we simply needed to move. Change takes time and there will be painful and unanticipated hiccups along the way. Count on it.

Change is the only option

Change is inevitable. Doing the same thing over and over today is just a slower road to failure. You can meander down the path, following the lead of others and changing along with those around you. Or you can establish your own vision and live purposefully, moving forward towards that vision today. Whatever choice you make, you will change.

If you are working to make a major change in your life, or you are being buffeted by changes thrown at you, put your vision on paper and commit to living more purposefully. The clarity and focus you gain will ground and strengthen you when otherwise you would be pushed off course.

So what vision are you pursuing today?

Eric Wittlake spends his days working with B2B marketers and (occasionally) shares his marketing views on his personal blog, B2B Digital Marketing. You can find him on Twitter (@wittlake) when he isn’t working with B2B marketers.

If you read through one piece of research this year it might just be a new report from the University of Pennsylvania on marketers, consumers, and privacy. The research is important not just for its surprising revelations about privacy but also for its unapologetic scolding of the way marketers have been mis-leading their customers.

The new Annenberg survey results indicate that marketers are misrepresenting a large majority of Americans by claiming that Americans willingly provide personal information as a tradeoff for benefits they receive. To the contrary, the survey reveals most Americans do not agree that “data for discounts” is fair.

The researchers say that Americans are resigned to giving up their data — and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs. Americans believe it is “futile” to manage what companies can learn about them.

Getting furious with marketers

The study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened. By misrepresenting the American people and championing the tradeoff argument, marketers give policymakers false justifications for allowing the collection and use of all kinds of consumer data often in ways that the public find objectionable.

The researchers write that the futility they found, combined with a broad public fear about what companies can do with the data, portends serious difficulties for the institution of consumer commerce.

This remarkable study provided a source of rich conversation for Tom Webster and I and we captured this conversation on our latest Marketing Companion radio show. You won’t want to miss our observations on:

The shocking way marketers are manipulating our personal data

How most Americans overestimate the extent to which the government protects them from discriminatory pricing

Why honesty can serve as a point of differentiation

Facebook’s leadership role in this issue

How companies are using personal information to institutionalize a profound form of discrimination

I believe this is one of the most illuminating discussions we have had on the podcast and I hope you’ll tune into this crucial discussion:

If you can’t access the podcast above, click on this link to listen to Episode 52

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Every time I write a post that takes a slightly contrarian view to the status quo, I get hammered by the entrenched pundits who spin this into “Mark is saying that marketing is dead”… or social media is dead … Or that kittens are bad. You get the point.

Today I am going to point out a THREAT to inbound marketing to make you think about what we have considered traditional dynamics of inbound marketing in a new way. I am not saying anything is dead. Really.

Let’s take a look at some of the current marketing trends and how they might make inbound marketing much more difficult in the future.

Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring high-potential visitors in, rather than relying on sales people having to make cold calls to garner “outbound” leads. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to your website like a magnet.

Hubspot tends to view inbound marketing as an engine for leads. I tend to view Inbound marketing as an engine for relationships. But in the end, the goal is the same — sales.

The game is changing

The economics of the social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are also driven by content, but their metrics are different. They’re not trying to generate leads for a discrete product. They are trying to:

a) collect more personal information about you so …

b) they can charge advertisers for targeted display ads.

The economic driver for both of these priorities is time on site, also known as dwell time, which is becoming a factor in SEO, Facebook content visibility, and content marketing strategy. The more time you spend consuming a piece of content, the more information is collected and the more ads you can see.

A few years ago, the major social platforms were happy to have your links to great content but now they are transforming themselves into virtual news and entertainment channels because they want you to spend time on their site, not yours.

For example the Facebook content strategy now includes a video viewer to keep people on their newsfeed they are wooing major content channels to publish directly on their site. LinkedIn has become a significant content publishing platform featuring some of the biggest names in business. Even Facebook ads will keep you on the Facebook app or site, interacting with advertising content directly within Facebook instead of clicking through to your site.

No content creator should be happy about this development but the biggest channels may get a cut of the action. Facebook has proposed hosting content from the New York Times, National Geographic, Buzzfeed, and other major news sites and involving them in a revenue-sharing deal. (Here is a prediction: Facebook will eventually begin to acquire content sites and produce their own original content like Netflix).

The implications

So if you’re not The New York Times or Buzzfeed and can’t expect to make money from posting content directly to Facebook, what do these trends mean for you?

If you have been counting on Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms as a primary distribution strategy for your content links, increasingly, the best way to gain exposure in those places is to actually post the full-form “sticky content” on those sites to achieve massive dwell time. This is probably the best strategy to at least achieve exposure for your content through organic reach.

The option that seems to be developing is, post the full-form content or get relegated to the dustbin. And that means those posts are NOT driving people to your website like the good old link used to do. The inbound traffic is now headed away from you, to Facebook and LinkedIn, instead of the homebase. Now the content magnet is on Facebook instead of your site where you have all those dandy calls to action.

What’s a marketer to do? I don’t have all the answers. That’s why I have a comment section and a community of super-smart people. Let me know your thought on this, won’t you?

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-Mark Schaefer